Quitting cable? Read this first

Thinking of cutting your cable television? There are lots of options on the Internet these days, but make sure you know what you want before you switch.

Thinking of cutting your cable television? There are lots of options on the Internet these days, but make sure you know what you want before you switch. (Tribune file photo by Chuck Berman)

Eric Gwinn, Tribune newspapers

Success of Internet TV — Netflix streaming accounts for most of the Internet's bandwidth during prime time — is making people think about dropping their cable company. After all, they wonder, why pay for a bunch of channels I don't watch? Why not just subscribe to the shows I want from Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon or iTunes?

I've been doing that for weeks using a Boxee Box from D-Link, an Apple TV and a Roku XD. I've been comparing them to life with my cable company, Comcast, and I can tell you there's no comparison. For ease of use, breadth and depth of content, cable is king. It's not perfect — nothing is — but it's there and it just works. No assembly required.

Not so for so-called for Internet TV. Relying a box such as Apple TV, Roku, or Boxee limits your choices of shows, locks you into certain rules for watching TV and forces you to use your computer as part of your TV watching experience. If you're renting shows, your choice of one of these boxes isn't so critical, but when it's time to subscribe to a show so you can watch every episode, you'll have to think long and hard about how you'll deal with those limits and rules.

And if you're thinking you're escaping ads by going to Internet TV, think about this: Advertisers will go where the eyeballs are, so if everybody switches to Netflix, you can bet ads will follow. Netflix has to make money, the studios that make TV shows and movies have to make money.

So all in all, Internet TV is not there yet, but it has strengths.

Listen to Brian Jaquet, Roku spokesman: "Devices like ours rose in popularity not because they are cable killers, but because they are affordable, easy to use and provide great complementary value to a cable/satellite subscription that someone may already have."

In some ways, cable can actually be cheaper — and less of a headache — than going without. For instance, if you watch a lot of different TV shows, your cable bill will be cheaper than using Internet TV to subscribe to the shows you want to watch.

If you quit cable and you and the kids want to watch Internet TV at the same time, good luck.

"Virtually nobody has enough bandwidth to do streaming to more than one device simultaneously," points out David Wertheimer, CEO and executive director of the Entertainment Technology Center at the University of Southern California. "The 'cord-cutting' hype is totally overblown."

But if you're determined to go without cable, deciding how you want to get your shows and movies will take some work. List the TV series you can't live without. If you go without cable, plan how you will find out about new shows (friends? Facebook?) and how you'll watch those shows if they are not available through the Internet TV box you buy. And prepare to make some compromises.